“Not me,” said Roxane. “I did it last time.”
“This is stupid,” Yoshi said. He slammed the dishwasher door, slapped the “on” button, and strode from the cafeteria. The dishwasher hummed and emitted a high-pitched whine that rose beyond the limits of human hearing.
Heather followed her father.
“Guess it was his turn,” Roxane said dryly. Barbary hurried after her sister.
“What was that all about?”
“It used to be a joke,” Heather said. “Because it’s so easy. Who washes the dishes just means who pushes the button. I guess… Yoshi doesn’t feel much like joking today.”
“He sounded sort of upset, earlier.”
“Yeah. Because of Thea. They spend a lot of time together. Or anyway they did, till the spaceship appeared. Now, well, she’s real busy. I mean, you can tell — she hasn’t even had time to come meet you yet.”
Barbary wished Heather would not put her in the middle of a disagreement between Yoshi and his lover. In her experience that was a dangerous place to be. She headed down the hallway toward the apartment.
“Wait, Barbary,” Heather said. “This way.”
“Is that a short-cut back to your place?”
“Uh-uh. This is the way to the reception hall.”
Barbary stopped. “We’re not going home?”
“Not till later.”
The other adults passed. As they turned a corner, Chhay called back, “Come on, kids.”
“Heather — ” She waited till she was sure she could talk without being overheard. “What about Mick? I have to feed him. My pocket is all full of wet shrimp, and you said we could go back after dinner!”
“Oh, gee, I’m sorry — I meant after the reception. Besides, when you said not to take anything I thought you meant he wasn’t very hungry.”
“Oh. No. I just meant —” She almost said that if anybody had noticed Heather’s pulling soggy bits of chicken out of her curry, it would have given them both away. But she did not want to hurt Heather’s feelings. “I just meant you haven’t had a chance to practice sleight of hand.”
“Well, look, we can’t go back now.”
“He’s going to be awful hungry.”
“But it’ll look too suspicious if we miss this party.”
Yoshi returned.
“Are you two all right?”
“Sure,” said Heather. “We’re coming.” She glanced at Barbary as if to say, See what I mean?
Barbary knew that if she kept behaving strangely, she would be sent back to earth. The friendship Yoshi had felt for her mother, twenty years before, would protect her only so far. She sighed and followed Heather. She tried to forget her pocketful of wet shrimp.
If I don’t look at them, she said to herself, nobody else will, either.
Chapter Seven
Heather and Barbary followed Yoshi to the one-g level of the station and into the reception hall.
“Wow,” Heather said. “It’s hot in here.” She looked around. “Whoever’s running balance on the station must be having a great time. I never saw so many people all in one place.”
Barbary found the crowd neither large nor dense enough to bother her. Back on earth she had seen riots. Once she had even been caught at the edge of one. But Heather did not need to know about that experience. This crowd surrounded her with cheer and expectation, with eagerness to meet Jeanne Velory. Partitions lay fan-folded against the walls, pulled back to create a large meeting room from areas usually set aside for classes and lectures. All the chairs stood stacked in the corners, for the room did hold too many people for anybody to sit down.
Barbary and Heather made their way slowly through the crowd. Barbary could tell the station-dwellers from the grounders. About half the people here wore rather formal clothes, and the rest dressed like Heather and Yoshi, in T-shirts and drawstring shorts or pants. The grounders looked heavier, somehow, as if the one gravity of the station held them, while the station-dwellers seemed to bring with them the lower gravity of the inner ring. Barbary puzzled over the strange impression, because of course it was impossible. Gravity did not work that way. But that was how it looked to her even if she could not explain it, any more than she could explain the form the tea-steam took, or walking “down” an “up” grade, or the tilt of the elevator floor.
She wondered what she looked like herself: a grounder or — what did the people on the station call themselves? Atlanteans? Einsteinians? All the questions she wanted to ask tumbled over one another in her mind.
“Well. Barbary. Hello.”
She started. Jeanne Velory gazed down at her, her expression pleasant, neutral, cool.
“Oh. Hi.”
“Settling in all right?”
“Yes. Uh… thanks.
Heather nudged her. For the first three or four pokes in the ribs, Barbary had no idea why. Finally she figured it out.
“Jeanne, um, Dr. Velory. This is Heather. My new sister.”
“How do you do, Heather.” Jeanne shook Heather’s small, slender hand. “We never were introduced, the last time I was here.”
“No, I was just a kid then, anyway,” Heather said.
“Have you shown Barbary the station yet?”
“We haven’t had time. Tomorrow, I’m going to start.”
Barbary blushed on being reminded that she had turned down Jeanne’s offer of a guided tour around Outrigger.
“I saw the observation bubble,” Barbary said. “In the transport ship. I found it myself. I stayed in it a lot. Nobody else was ever there.”
Jeanne frowned, hearing the defensiveness in Barbary’s voice, but her expression softened.
“I’m glad you found it,” she said. “And you’re right, hardly anyone else spent any time there. We wasted our time, instead. Arguing. We’d have done a lot better to look at the stars.” She held out her hand to Heather again, then to Barbary. “I hope you like it here.”
“Thanks,” Barbary said.
“Dr. Velory…”
A tall man in a grounder suit touched Jeanne’s shoulder. She let him turn her away to introduce her to a whole group of people, who closed in and cut her off from Barbary and Heather.
“You didn’t tell me you knew her!” Heather said.
“I don’t — we just sat next to each other on the shuttle. She knew who you are, though.”
“Oh, yeah, big deal, everybody knows who I am, Heather the first space-baby. Really tiresome. I tell you, Barbary, it’s great to have somebody else on the station who’s under eighteen.” She grinned. “Let’s go get some punch. Maybe they even have a buffet ... and you can give me a lesson in sleight of hand.”
o0o
The reception was a great success, but for Barbary it went on forever. Only when it began to break up did Heather think they could leave without attracting attention. Barbary had assumed they would be able to appear, then sneak off. Back on earth, no one ever cared if she disappeared. But Heather’s absence would be noticed as much as her presence. Barbary began to see some of the drawbacks of Heather’s life. She still envied her all the years she had spent up here — but she could see the drawbacks.
Now she followed Heather through the crowd. It was thinner, but still thick enough to make finding anyone a problem. Finally they saw Yoshi.
“I’m getting kind of tired,” Heather said to him. “We’re going to go on home.”
“That’s a good idea,” Yoshi said. “I’ll come with you.”
Heather gave Barbary an anxious glance. Barbary took care not to react. She figured she had about one more chance at acting weird in front of Yoshi before he decided she was seriously nuts. Besides, even if he came back with them everything would be all right as long as he did not barge into Heather’s room. And as long as Mick was not yowling at the top of his lungs when they got there.
Barbary had succeeded in forgetting about the shrimp until she started home. Just as the books on stage magic claimed, her ignoring something had kept others from noticing it. But as soon as she got on the elevator to the inner ring, she became uncomfortably aware of the damp handful of crustaceans in her pocket. And she thought she could smell them, too. She glanced sidelong at Yoshi, but he stared out at the stars, somewhere else entirely.